IBM Watson is best known for winning the game show Jeopardy, but its natural language processing engine, its powerful database, machine learning architecture and incredibly fast and accurate search capabilities are poised to disrupt more than a few industries. The medical industry is already experimenting with Watson to ask very pointed questions on curing cancer or stopping the spread of Ebola. In the legal vertical, Watson hasn't made any headlines other than some theoretical discussions around helping with eDiscovery, complex litigation matters or perhaps helping with aspects of legal research.

That has all changed. The theoretical capabilities and disruptive force of computing on the legal industry may actually be here sooner than expected.

IBM has started a new annual program called the Watson University Competition, where it challenges graduate and undergraduate university students to utilize Watson in ways never imagined. A group of students at the University of Toronto developed a new Watson based system called ROSS, dubbed “The Super Intelligent Attorney.” ROSS takes in natural-language legal questions, performs legal research on the issues within the question and attempts to answer the questions with confidence levels.